Friday, June 28, 2019

Hold the Dolby

I remember when I got my first cassette player with "Dolby® Noise
Reduction". It was pretty cool. Gone was the hiss of the tape. Gone were
the crackles and pops from the LPs I'd recorded into homemade
cassettes.

But the polish came off that apple pretty quickly.
Gone along with those vanished hisses, pops and crackles were the sounds
of fingers on guitar strings, and breathing woodwind players, and sounds of picks on fretboard ends.

Dolby sucked the life right out of my favorite recordings. Perfect was,
in this case, not perfect. Those extraneous noises were very much a
part of the vitality of the recordings. The noise reduction that Dolby
offered me came at a too high price -- lifeless listening.

Perfection, as a craftsman's goal is admirable. There's a strange
balancing act. Always a balancing act -- achieving an end result that,
in its perfection both appears to transcend the means of its production
-- while at the same time leaving the hint of the humanity behind in the
creation.

Craft has historically thrived when technology is
perceived as a threat to our human expression. Man vs. Machine. The
Steam Drill vs. John Henry romanticism. In this digital age when even
much of our "art" is computer generated, there are still those of us who
aren't ready to give up the hands-on exploration of human trial and
accomplishment.

So, should thrown pottery be perfect?

Yes. In the sense of a craftsman's results coming close to meeting his
intentions, yes. Perfection is a worthy goal. Control the medium. No
excuses.

But just maybe that craft should also be a celebration
of the idiosyncratic material -- clay -- a cussed substance that
doesn't always stay where you put it, warps, shrinks, and cracks when
handled poorly.

And just maybe the marks of the potter's hands
as a reminder that process matters -- matters to lots of us humans --
should not be erased from surfaces, rather, be enjoyed as the part of a
better whole.

It's not about celebrating imperfection or
rationalizing lazy practice. It's not trying to accept a "it's good
enough for..." mentality. The striving should always be there. The
striving should always be evident.

I want my recordings to hiss
and pop if it means I also still hear the squeak of fingers on strings
letting me know that there was a living, breathing human behind the
recording -- a human who was participating in the activity of filling
the world with exciting, beautiful, thoughtful work.

And I want
my pottery to have finger marks, double stamps, bent walls, irregular
trailed lines -- not for their own sake -- not as added affectation to
elicit calculated response -- but as evidence of process. I want those
things that remind me that there was a striving human with lofty goals
willing to risk time, talent, and not a small amount of hope that
he/she'd be putting something of value into our shared world.